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We argue that impact velocities between dust grains with sizes less than $\sim 0.1$ $\mu m$ in molecular cloud cores are dominated by drift arising from ambipolar diffusion. This effect is due to the size dependence of the dust coupling to…
We employ the first fully three-dimensional simulation to study the role of magnetic fields and ion-neutral friction in regulating gravitationally-driven fragmentation of molecular clouds. The cores in an initially subcritical cloud develop…
Outflows and jets are intimately related to the formation of stars, and play an important role in redistributing mass, energy and angular momentum within the dense core and parent cloud. The interplay between magnetic field and rotation is…
The formation mechanism of massive stars remains one of the main open problems in astrophysics, in particular the relationship between the mass of the most massive stars, and that of the cores in which they form. Numerical simulations of…
Like their lower mass siblings, massive protostars can be expected to: a) be surrounded by circumstellar disks and b) launch magnetically-driven jets and outflows. The disk formation and global evolution is thereby controlled by advection…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
A simple model of gas accretion in young galaxy disks suggests that fast turbulent motions can be driven by accretion energy for a time t_acc~2(epsilon^{0.5} GM^2/xi V^3)^{0.5} where epsilon is the fraction of the accretion energy going…
The formation of low-mass stars in molecular clouds involves accretion disks and jets, which are of broad astrophysical interest. Accreting stars represent the closest examples of these phenomena. Star and planet formation are also…
During a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE), an accretion disk forms as stellar debris returns to the disruption site and circularizes. Rather than being confined within the circularizing radius, the disk can spread to larger radii to…
The filamentary structure of the molecular interstellar medium and the potential link of this morphology to star formation have been brought into focus recently by high resolution observational surveys. An especially puzzling matter is that…
Millimeter sized dust grains experience radial velocities exceeding the gas velocities by orders of magnitude. The viscous evolution of the accretion disk adds disk material onto the central star's convective envelope, influencing its…
We discuss the lifetimes and evolution of clumps and cores formed as turbulent density fluctuations in nearly isothermal molecular clouds. In the non-magnetic case, clumps are unlikely to reach a hydrostatic state, and instead are expected…
Protoplanetary disks dissipate rapidly after the central star forms, on time-scales comparable to those inferred for planet formation. In order to allow the formation of planets, disks must survive the dispersive effects of UV and X-ray…
Observations have revealed that most stars are born in clusters. As these clusters typically contain more mass in gas than in stars, accretion can play an important role in determining the final stellar masses. Numerical simulations of gas…
We demonstrate that the formation of collapsing cores in subcritical clouds is accelerated by nonlinear flows, by performing three-dimensional non-ideal MHD simulations. An initial random supersonic (and trans-Alfvenic) turbulent-like flow…
Magnetic fields play an important role in star formation by regulating the removal of angular momentum from collapsing molecular cloud cores. Hall diffusion is known to be important to the magnetic field behaviour at many of the…
This chapter reviews the dynamical processes in young stellar clusters. The accretion of gas by individual stars affects the dynamics of the cluster, and the masses of the stars. Dynamical mass segregation cannot explain the degree of mass…
We investigate the role of ambipolar diffusion (AD) in collisions between magnetized giant molecular clouds (GMCs), which may be an important mechanism for triggering star cluster formation. Three dimensional simulations of GMC collisions…
Dust grains grow in interstellar clouds by accretion and coagulation. In this paper, we focus on these two grain growth processes and numerically investigate how they interplay to increase the grain radii. We show that accretion efficiently…
We present an investigation of massive star formation that results from the gravitational collapse of massive, magnetized molecular cloud cores. We investigate this by means of highly resolved, numerical simulations of initial magnetized…